PS. Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay should make Kurt Eichenwald a character witness. In his account, they don’t look venal, or even dumb. They just look like they were out of the picture - trusting corporate managers who trusted, perhaps, unwisely.

What a coincidence -- I am listening to No Ordinary Time on tape, read by Edward Hermann. He is driving me crazy! Every time he quotes Eleanor R., his voice goes up an octave. When he quotes FDR, he adopts this East Coast accent. I'm not sure how you have one narrator read text and quoted dialogue/writings, though without these problems.

Still, after five hours with Eichenwald, I felt like I might have a view about just what Enron did wrong (very unlike the inept left wing hit-job The Smartest Guys in the Room, which I liked much less than Christine, who has a pretty even-handed view).

I would point out that The Smartest Guys In The Room is the name of a book *and* the movie based on the book. I thought the book was quite good, and in no way an "inept left wing hit-job." (I've never seen the movie, which for all I know may deserve that characterization.)

Christine: Interesting. I thought Ed Hermann walked on water. I've put each of his 78 movies on my Netflix queue - and that includes Welcome to Mooseport. Double interesting because he's played FDR a bunch of times on TV.

Alikali - Right, right, I'm referring to the doc, which had almost no insight - except that provided by the book's authors, who were pretty good.

David, are you saying that there are at least some (if not many) law review articles available on tape? If so, I'd love to know about that, because audio could be a good way to screen things worth reading -- like going to a conference and hearing papers presented, I guess.

If you are willing to fork out the money, you can buy audiotapes of professional conferences. I have bought the tapes from a conference of the Association of Business Communicators, the International
Coach Federation (non-sports) and others.

You can get up-to-date introductions to other fields of endeavor that impact business and law from these, such as crisis management and how to network in specific settings.

Not to turn this into all-Enron, all-the-time, but as someone who was fairly intimately involved in the subject matter of the documentary, I'd contest David's suggestion that the film had "almost no insight."

I agree that it didn't say much about whether/how the major players did very bad things. And its treatment of the California energy crisis is laughable on several levels. That said, the film does make one significant contribution: It gets the "feel" of Enron circa 1999-2001 almost exactly right.

The Enron environment at that time was a perfect incubator for the hubris that ultimately undid the company. Although the film is weakened by factual inaccuracy and self-serving commentary, it perfectly captures the corporate culture, from the Skillings, Lays and Fastows down to the individual traders. And that culture played an enormous role in the company's ultimate unraveling.

Lurker - it's gonna be even more Enron around here. I'll post more for one thing. But one thing that irritates me about popular Enron accounts, as you say, is the linking of the collapse and the California stuff - which made Enron money, and helped to prevent a collapse, and other than that has nothing to do with the story, shares any of the players, nada.

Scott and Cheryl - more posts required on audioscholarship too, obvs. One place to look - and I'll put this up above the line soon - is http://www.blawgcast.com/. But for real actual papers, I'm as bereft as you....